Quotes of the day

posted at 10:41 pm on June 4, 2014 by Allahpundit

Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Wednesday urged Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s critics not to “judge” him until all the facts are in and sharply defended the extensive and risky search efforts that claimed the lives of some of his fellow soldiers.

“We did a huge number of operations to try to stop the Taliban from being able to move him across the border into Pakistan,” McChrystal told Yahoo News in an exclusive interview. “And we made a great effort and put a lot of people at risk in doing that, but that’s what you should do. That’s what soldiers do for each other.”…

“We’re going to have to wait and talk to Sgt. Bergdahl now and get his side of the story,” he said. “One of the great things about America is we should not judge until we know the facts. And after we know the facts, then we should make a mature judgment on how we should handle it.”

***

One senior military source says many at Pentagon advised the President not to make the trade of Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl.

While top GOP lawmakers and commentators are charging that it was wrong for the United States to barter with terrorists for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, defense officials and analysts are defending the negotiations, saying the release of the Taliban leaders is not so dire for US armed forces.

For one, the US has not designated the Taliban, which held Sergeant Bergdahl captive for five years, as a terrorist organization, in part to allow the government to make exactly such deals when it needs to, the officials and analysts note.

Second, it’s not clear how valuable, or trusted, the Taliban leaders who have been held by the US for five years will be to an organization that is rather large and not lacking in leadership, they say.

***

A former chairman of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth defended Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers from a White House charge that they are unfairly “swiftboating” the former Taliban captive by coming forward to criticize him. Bergdahl’s questionable conduct, he suggests, is analogous to that of Secretary of State John Kerry, whom the group famously opposed in the 2004 presidential election.

“Those guys had friends who died in Afghanistan like we had friends who died in Vietnam, and to allow this kind of thing to occur really does tarnish the whole memory of all those people who gave their lives,” former co-chairman John O’Neill told National Review Online. “To allow a guy like this to be posed as a hero, like Kerry self-posing as a hero, is really an affront to everybody who died there, and that’s why those guys in his platoon have come forward and that’s why we came forward 40 years ago and ten years ago.”

***

White House aides were aware Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl had been tagged a deserter, and that they would be grilled over not keeping Congress in the loop. But they figured people would be most outraged over the national security implications.

The White House has been surprised by how much attention has remained on the questions about Bergdahl, from the circumstances of his disappearance to the wild beard his father grew while he was being held that’s even led to Bergdahl’s hometown canceling a celebration. All this, Obama aides say, is in their minds a proxy for the hatred toward the president.

The new PR plan: Frame the criticism as another example of Republicans complaining about something just because Obama was the one to do it…

Obama aides say they’re not worried about the prospect of weeks of segments on Fox News or hearings by a Republican House that has spent four years investigating and rebuffing the White House on issues like Solyndra and Fast and Furious.

Obama appeared to advance his effort last month when a Senate panel approved greater authority for him to transfer suspected terrorists to the United States, on condition he presented a plan to close Guantanamo and Congress approved it.

But the deal that freed Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after five years of captivity has driven a new wedge between the president and lawmakers of both parties who accuse the Obama administration of breaking the law.

“When people are saying the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorist groups, is that statute or is that general policy?” a reporter asked deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf during Wednesday’s press briefing.

“Well, our line is that we don’t make concessions,” Harf replied. “I mean, that’s the — you’re quoting it colloquial. That’s actually not what you’ll hear us say from the podium.”

***

“Save the deserter” is a recent battle cry of the politically indoctrinated brass. For much of our history, we did make some efforts to track down deserters in wartime. Then we shot or hanged them. Or, if we were in good spirits, we merely used a branding iron to burn a large D into their cheeks or foreheads. Even as we grew more enlightened, desertion brought serious time in a military prison. At hard labor…

It’s hard to believe that the resulting court-martial would not find Bergdahl guilty of desertion (although there will be heavy White House pressure to reduce the charge to Absent Without Leave, or AWOL, status, a lesser offense). If he is convicted, I for one do not want him to go to prison. I’m sure he’s paid and paid for betraying his comrades, quite possibly suffering brutal sexual violence. But if he is found guilty, he needs to be formally reduced to the rank of private, stripped of all privileges and entitlements (the taxpayer should not pay for a deserter’s lifelong health care — Bergdahl’s book and film deals can cover that), and he should be given the appropriate prison sentence, which would then be commuted by the president. Thereafter, let Mr. Bergdahl go home and live with himself.

As for President Obama, how about just one word of thanks to the families of those fallen soldiers you sent out to find Bowe Bergdahl?

***

I asked former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Navy SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient who lost part of his leg in Vietnam, these questions. His answers were more haunting than I expected. We started with the Bergdahl case.

“He’s got men in his own unit asking for him to be court-martialed,” Kerrey said. “That matters. If he had fought his way out of an ambush and then was captured by the Taliban it would be a much different deal.”…

“It’s always difficult to do an exchange like this,” Kerrey said. “It’s always risky. Does this provoke the Taliban to want to take more U.S. prisoners? I honestly don’t know. It’s unfair to any prisoner over there to say they should not be brought home. But does it increase the risk to the remaining troops in Afghanistan? I do trust [Defense Secretary] Chuck Hagel and [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman] Martin Dempsey and I believe they have thought this through. The president may have the best of the argument on the facts. But the idea there wouldn’t be blowback, I mean, I am constantly surprised at what [the White House is] surprised about. The president can say it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to him. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to other people.”…

Blowback

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Bmore or anyone else, I want to report coolrepublica and Koch. They are not here for the same reasons most of us are. I’m tired of their outright trolling and disruption. I don’t think Ed would like what they are doing, as he showed with Panther.

I have a few comments in mind to send, including ones from the Van Jones thread, but am not sure if I need to include them in any report I make. Any suggestions on how it would be best for me to go about this?

non-nonpartisan on June 5, 2014 at 10:10 AM

Hi grams, so you reported me for disruption? I feel so sad inside. But I still like you. No hard feeling. Do you know how soon I should expect that contact because I would hate to miss it?

Obama used the known deserter/traitor/musloid convert Bergdahl for the release of the top five most valuable Gitmo detainees because the entire former American government, now fronted by the imbecile-puppet Obama, along with the Clinton machine, and a massive contingent of bureaucrat operatives loyal to the megabanks saturating all three branches and the military, has been overthrown and is explicitly allied with islam. Obama, Clinton, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon and on and on has been completely infiltrated by the Musloid Brotherhood, and those not in the MB per se are allied with it because it is a highly complementary political system with a litany of shared goals and objectives, namely the establishment of a tyrannical oligarchy looting and dominating by terror a massive, destitute underclass. Obama IS Musloid Brotherhood, for all intents and purposes. They own him and have since his earliest days. No, he doesn’t believe in the faux-religious aspects of the musloid political system, because almost none of the musloids above the very lowest caste do. It’s a TOTALITARIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM, not a religion. Hillary Clinton is up to her neck in Musloid Brotherhood. Good grief, her right hand “man” and likely lesbian concubine, Huma Abedin, is the daughter of TWO of the highest-ranking Musloid Brotherhood leaders on the planet. The CIA is headed by a “convert” to islam, John Brennan.

When I read commentator after commentator breathlessly asking, “Why would they do this? It looks so bad!” I just shake my head. They did it because THEY ARE THE ENEMY. They’re not Americans. America is dead. It’s their state now, and they will do what they want, when they want, and what you think about it or what the Constitution or the old U.S. Code says is utterly, totally, completely irrelevant.

They don’t care that it looks bad because the overthrow of the constitutional republic is a fait accompli and has been for YEARS. What the hell are you going to do about it? Nothing. Oh, you’ve made that PERFECTLY clear. These people have been committing CAPITAL OFFENSES according to the old U.S. Code on a daily basis for YEARS and NO ONE GIVES A SHIT. No one will do anything except cluck their tongues and shake their heads. Every day you can find some new piece commenting on all of this which uses the word “outrage”. What are you talking about, “I’m outraged”? No you aren’t. If you were outraged you would have done something, and you would have done it a long time ago. And no, signing some bullshit “petition” online is NOT DOING SOMETHING. Spamming people with emails saying, “Oh my gosh, this is outrageous!” is NOT DOING SOMETHING. Making up a damn Twitter hashtag is NOT DOING SOMETHING. Showing up to a “march” where people go for a leisurely walk in a circle with their friends, and then have a cook-out or picnic, and then everyone’s home in time for Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead IS NOT DOING SOMETHING. “Liking” a post on Facebook is NOT DOING SOMETHING.

Catching shameless, conscienceless, murderous psychopaths who now control the largest economy and largest military in human history in a lie or in blatant hypocrisy is not going to cause them to hang their heads in shame and slink off into shameful obscurity. Elections? How stupid do you have to be to still persist in the delusion that A.) elections are fairly contested and B.) this can be solved by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, which isn’t sinking, it’s ALREADY SUNK AND SITTING ON THE OCEAN FLOOR 2.5 MILES DOWN?

There is only one way these people will ever, ever, ever be stopped. They must be forcefully, physically removed. This means war. This means hot counter-revolution. This means people are going to die on all sides. They will commit atrocities, because they are in the most literal sense, atrocious human beings. The definition of “atrocious” is “horrifyingly wicked”. They will burn everything to the ground and salt the earth before they release their grasp on the money and the power over human life that they have, and continue to gather to themselves in an insatiable lust with each passing day.

And each day there is a new crime, and the frequency of the crimes themselves is the means by which they keep you distracted and wallowing in what I can only describe as a masturbatory impotence driven by a false fantasy of your own “outrage”. Your “outrage” is no more real than the pornographic fantasies people use to masturbate sexually. And every 36 hours – like clockwork – you are handed a new vector for your “outrage” fetish, and the previous one, no longer capable of sustaining the proverbial erection, is forgotten as quickly as it was introduced. Because THIS ONE, this new “outrage”, this is going to be THE ONE, this is going to be the “outrage orgasm” to end all outrage orgasms, and they’re all going to resign, and then it’s going to be “Morning in America” and it’s going to feel just like it did when we were kids forever.

Why don’t I write more? Why don’t I comment extensively on these daily crimes? Why don’t I record podcasts? Because I don’t want to be a Hefner or Guccione or Flynt of this “outrage porn”, feeding this false facade of “oh my gosh, we’re totally doing something” when in fact, you are growing ever more flaccid and ever more supine with each passing day, lost in the fantasy of your own potency.

I dunno. I just don’t know what more to do. I guess all I can do. Pray, and maybe spread a little Gospel. I dunno.

Nothing will be done. You two fancy yourselves as smart it would seem. Though your appearance would suggest otherwise. You do realize that there are commenters here that work for Salem communications, right?